Quotes and speeches of the month

Welcome to this website devoted to the art of speeches in Europe today. Logos, pathos, ethos brings you some of the best quotes, speeches, and rhetorical tips. As its name suggests, this multilingual website is inspired by the long-standing European tradition of the art of speeches stretching back over twenty-five centuries. It seeks to shine a spotlight on speeches that matter on the European stage today.

Logos Pathos Ethos, February 2016

Dear speech-fans and friends,

From Holocaust Remembrance Day to the World Economic
Forum to the State of the Union in Washington, January calls for great
speeches.
Here is your monthly selection of powerful lines and rhetorical tools.

Whether you craft or collect quotations, you may be
interested to read more on the power of virtuous quotes in this piece of research
published in the January-February 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

As
a German born in 1955, I did not live through the darkest times in the history
of my country. But the mass murder committed by the Nazis in the name of my
nation was the reason I became involved in politics, as I vowed: Never again. …

I
say this as a German, as a politician and as a father:

We
must keep the memory alive.

We
must tell our children about the crimes committed in Theresienstadt, in
Auschwitz, Birkenau and elsewhere. We must do so for the sake of our children,
we must tell them so that their children will tell the next generation.

Remembering
hurts, but we must teach our children how this unique crime in human history,
these barbaric acts of evil could happen in one of the most modernized
societies of that time.

How to own the room - Women and the art of brilliant speaking

Viv Groskop

Pay attention to the first two words of the title: “how to”: they imply that there is a way, that you can learn. And indeed, the idea that we – women, but “they don’t have the monopoly of insecurity”, so actually everybody, really – can learn “how to be powerful in (our) speaking is at the heart of this book.
Viv Groskop invites u[...]Read more

Quotation of the day

« This great (Berlin) Wall, this inhumane construction which claimed so many victims, no longer stands. The Wall is gone, once and for all.
However, new walls have emerged throughout our country: walls of frustration, walls of anger and hate. Walls of silence and alienation. Walls which are invisible and yet divide. Walls which stand in the way of s... »

Logos Pathos Ethos, November 2015

Our selection this month focuses on refreshing
openings, tangible examples, and ceremonial speeches and how they throw light
on our challenges today.

You may also like to listen
to a selection of Nobel Peace Lectures, in French and English, gathered by the
radio station France culture in these times between the announcement of the
Nobel Prizes (early October) and the Lectures to come (early December).

Even better, let’s meet! Our fellow speechwriter Jan
Sonneveld – whom I met at the World conference of the Professional
Speechwriters Association in Washington earlier this month – will be in town on
November 25th. Save your lunchbreak to meet this talented colleague (see his
Vital speech: How
Speechwriting Changed Me, or his Twitter
and Tumblr).
A « save-the-date » is following this mail.

What ails
Europe, what ails our nations today is a poisonous cocktail of a lack of mutual
trust and a lack of self-confidence. We are slow to react to challenges, we are
slow to implement even the most obvious common answers, because we do not
believe in ourselves, in our ability to adapt, to respond to challenges, to
make tomorrow better than today. We are slow to find common answers not because
there are no answers, but because we do not trust the word “common”…